love and hope
Immigrant-less day musings:
** The read on the media narrative seems to be a disconnect around class first, followed by race (lemme break that down in D&D terms - that's like a cloak of invisibility plus boots of silence). So the coverage is swinging wildly between scaring whitey and educating whitey; it's remarkable to see just how uncomfortable we still are about what poor brown people want.
** Themes of inequality aside (even if that's not explicit in coverage), the other component to today's story is of course money - again, not so explicit - poor brown people working for shit wages and no bennies and nada union makes for good times, good times for organized money. Organized poor brown people means organized money loses out. Morality sells tickets, but economics wins the ballgame: like it or not, money is the American frame, and the impetus driving all the booga-booga around today's events should be a good reminder for leaders in the anti-war and enviro movements.
** Comparing the kind of labor undocumented employees perform with the American South's legacy of slavery is really stupid and doesn't help La Cause-a. My history may be shaky on this matter, but I'm pretty sure enslaved people didn't get to march and didn't get employers shutting down the plantation in solidarity. So just stop all that.
** I spied a clutch of people at what appeared to be a Defend Colorado (sorry, go find it yourself) education session out in front of the capital early yesterday afternoon; far less fired-up and far-gone than the anti-choicers who routinely use up perfectly good weekends to stalk the Hill, much less fun (or for that matter, attractive) than the peace and love kids who make the scene every so often. For what it's worth, what I saw were either old people, old couples, who looked blinkered and unsure, or lean angry white guys who were staring down everyone they passed (okay, me). What I saw in the three minutes it took me to walk down Logan means nothing, really. Still, it felt like a lesson in contrasts - a few million people today going, as Marlon Brando said, to get their rights, and another, groping for a place in the world that no doubt seems like it's left them behind, a world that just keeps getting uppity-er and uppity-er.
But a little thinking and feeling goes a long way: Dex's padre, a regular joe with a great big heart but not too much in the way of political acumen, works with a crew of immigrants from places south of the border down Florida-way, and has quickly gotten hep to the kind of existential and economic limbo his co-workers and employees occupy. Now, mi padre is chock full of what Buddhists call basic goodness, hardly the staring-you-down type, but at least that's one more who didn't know before aboard the freedom train.
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